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The Ferret Light Scout VTOL was first introduced to House Davion troops in 2901 and later adopted by House Marik, House Steiner and certain Periphery powers. The vehicle serves as an advanced scout with the ability to monitor enemy troop movements and radio in artillery strikes. Thanks to its speed, a single Ferret can patrol a front of up to 20km long, moving quickly from one area to the next. The vehicle is lightly armored and a hit from nearly any kind of 'Mech weaponry will destroy the Ferret. However, the Ferret's job is to avoid combat, and its agility allows it to remain outside the effective range of the enemy's weapons until reinforcements arrived. Besides reconnaissance and artillery spotting, the Ferret's cargo capacity also makes it suitable for transport and rescue operations.[6][3][4]

The Ferret is armed with a MainFire MiniGun mounted in the front of the craft, supplied with a half-ton of ammunition, and intended for use only against the occasional infantry forces it may encounter. Its half-ton of armoring is also only good enough to ward off small-arms fire. Thanks to its powerful Tyron 25 ICE engine, the Ferret can easily maintain a cruising speed of 162 km/h, helping it avoid taking a hit in the first place. A one-ton Infantry Compartment can carry a full squad of infantry, which allows it to forward-deploy small infantry units quickly.[6][3][4]

The Ferret is also equipped with the IsBM Lantrin targeting-tracking system, which can plug into any standard Remote Sensor monitoring set and display its information on the pilot's Heads-Up Display (HUD).[6][3][4] Many Ferrets will carry up to 15 remote sensors in their cargo bay and deploy them via vertical drop chutes, allowing them to monitor a wide swath of territory.[6]

Introduced in 2967, this variant (also known as the "Wild Weasel") was Cal-Boeing's attempt to make the Ferret more combat-capable. The transport bay is removed, freeing up enough weight to increase the level of armor protection by one ton. BV (1.0) = 55[2], BV (2.0)= 103[7]

Cargo

Another variant was introduced by Cal-Boeing in 2972, though it does the complete opposite of the earlier "Wild Weasel." By removing all of the craft's armor, they were able to improve the Ferret's cargo carrying capacity to 2.5 tons without reducing performance.[4] It can also lift a total of 7.75 tons of cargo at the expense of a fifty percent reduction in performance.[6] BV (1.0) = 1[2], BV (2.0) = 17[8]

Ferret Fermi

First sighted in 3076, the Ferret Fermi is believed to have been developed by the AFFS for the Coalition's assault on Terra, specifically for hunting down the Panopticon SDS installations. The Fermi is known to have the same speed profile and one-ton cargo bay as the original but does not carry any weapons and uses a less-noisy Fusion Engine. It also employs special Myomer threads in the main rotor blades to dampen vibrations during flight, and its "NOTAR" tail boom is designed to exploit the Coanda effect, making the Fermi quieter in operation than any other known military VTOL. The Fermi also carries a half-ton of Vehicular Stealth Armor and a Clan-spec ECM Suite, rendering it invisible to all but the most sensitive sensor systems. These stealth features allow the Fermi to quickly insert a single infantry squad anywhere on the battlefield without being detected. A second variant without the stealth armor and using a Fuel Cell to power it is also believed to exist. The Ferret Fermi's deployment on Terra has not been confirmed, but it has been spotted in use by MI6 units on other operations.[9]